2015 and 2014 in Excel
Hello,
Are there plans to provide the 2015 and 2014 old exams in Excel format? There are Battle cards on them, but often times I end up skipping them for time's sake if they have a lot of numbers that need typing out, and I cannot copy and paste the numbers from the pdfs.
On another topic, when Battle Cards are marked as Outdated, does that mean it is safe to skip them altogether? Should these cards be removed from the Question Bank?
Thanks!
Comments
Your second question on outdated Battle Cards:
Yes, you can ignore the Battle Cards labelled as "outdated". I have already removed all outdated questions except those that are old exam questions. This is to maintain a complete history of old exam questions - otherwise there would be gaps which may then generate questions as to why they are missing. The BRQ-value of outdated questions is zero, so you can safely skip them without impacting your BRQ.
About your first question on converting 2015 and 2014 exams to Excel:
I understand the value of having exams in a format that allows for easy data manipulation. The reason I stopped at 2016 is that it is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Instead, I focused on selecting representative problems from the whole history of exams for which to create Excel versions (and step-by-step solutions) and these are all listed in the Excel Practice Problems wiki page.
Having said that however, the plan is for our staff to convert the entire 2014 and 2015 exams to Excel (as well as 2012 and 2013), but that likely won't be available before the 2024-Spring exam.
If there are particular calculation problems you'd like to do from those older exams without typing out all the numbers, I know there are free online tools for PDF-to-text (or PDF-to-Excel) conversion. These tools can convert the numerical data you need from the PDFs, allowing you to focus more on your study and less on manual data entry. (Apologies, I realize that puts some of the work back on you.)
(Side note: Many of the questions in the exams from these years are short-answer or essay-style, which wouldn't really from conversion to Excel. That was the other reason we stopped at 2016.)